The Austrian third-party logistics supplier, JCL Logistics, is enjoying the benefits of an automated handling solution designed by KNAPP that enables the company to meet the B2B and B2C demands of its clients in a flexible way.

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JCL Logistics, which has more than 60 sites across 25 countries, invested 18.5 million Euros in a 50,000m2 distribution centre in Werndorf, Austria, which acts as the logistical hub for customers in Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, Slovenia and parts of Germany. The facility – which ships more than 28 million articles of clothing for retail stores (B2B) and about 3.5 million items for direct customer orders (B2C) per year – features automated handling systems from KNAPP and Dürkopp Fördertechnik for both hanging garments and flat-packed items.

Efficient shuttle storage

After quality checking at goods-in, flat-packed items are placed into plastic totes, which are then transported to KNAPP’s OSR Shuttle™ automatic storage and retrieval system. The OSR Shuttle™, with its retrieval capacity of 1000 totes per hour, forms the heart of JCL’s order picking operations. The system stores totes weighing up to 35kg two-deep in two aisles, with 23 levels giving a total of 15,000 storage locations.

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Speedy picking with Fastbox

The B2B orders for JCL’s various clients are processed at two of KNAPP’s ergonomically designed Pick-it-Easy workstations, which are served by the OSR Shuttle™ system. The operator is guided by pick-to-light displays and an intuitive user interface to select a number of items from the source container and place them as directed in multiple target containers. This computer-controlled batching of orders allows the physical accessing of storage totes to be minimised and the number of picks per operator/hour to be maximised. Each workstation has two Fastbox towers located immediately alongside to store fast-moving products, particularly those featured in current promotional campaigns. The short transport distance from the picker and the ultra-fast handling combine to ensure maximum picking speed for these frequently required goods.

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The processing of e-commerce orders takes place in a separate area, using four of KNAPP’s Sort & Pack stations. Goods required for these orders are retrieved from the OSR Shuttle™ and conveyed to these workstations, where staff pick the required items and place them into a ‘pigeon hole’ system according to pick-to-light displays.

AGV system

After picking in the B2B and B2C areas, containers are transported via the conveyor system to the ground floor, where they are manually placed on pallets. An AGV system – KNAPP’s KiSoft Automove laser-guided forklift solution – then transports them to the correct location in the hanging goods area, where they are consolidated with orders for hanging goods.

Hanging garments

The DC features a fully automatic hanging goods area with a comprehensive overhead conveyor solution featuring individual item tracking and sortation. The system includes a tunnel finisher, used to eliminate creases through a steaming process. A Matrix Sortation system is used to sort the garments by store, discount offer, style, colour and ascending size, with some 6,000 items per hour being processed. After merging of individual garments into handling units ready for delivery, these are plastic-wrapped for protection and labelled before being automatically loaded into the correct delivery vehicle using telescopic conveyors at one of six dispatch ramps.

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